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Investing

01/19/2016

On January 5, I had a chance to be a panelist at a discussion titled Enhancing Opportunities in the Transatlantic Market: Best Practices for SMEs and Startups Including Innovative Finance, organized by the European-American Enterprise Council and the U.S. Commerce Department, alongside the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

TradeUp director Kimberly Benson moderated the seven-member panel of people who help make business and investments flow across the Atlantic. The tips I offered to U.S. and European entrepreneurs that look to alternative financing platforms to raise capital include:

Do your homework. With financing platforms proliferating, companies need to do their homework to find the right fit in terms of sector, size, size and type of raise, types of investors (e.g., angels vs. institutionals), and preferred monetization model (e.g., commission vs. subscription). Household name platforms are not necessarily the best bet: research the market for providers that are working on, and have investors for, companies like yours.

Consider alignment of interests. If you want the platform to be on your side, follow the money. Consider how the platform is paid. If the platform makes money on raises that succeed, it is interested in helping you raise; if it makes money on monthly subscriptions, it has an interest in filling the platform with companies like yours. You may want to work with the former set — and make sure you work with a team licensed to market your raise (act as broker-dealer) and is in compliance with U.S. financial regulations.

Be proactive: Advertising your raise on a platform is just the start. It gets you 5 percent of the way to your goal. Even if you have an expert platform team promoting your raise, they are not inside your business. It is your job to keep the fundraising team up to date on developing within your business and with your clients. It is also your job to market and do PR for your business and generate buzz useful for your raise. And it is your job to close an investor coming through a platform — so do perfect your pitch.

TradeUp is keen to work with European companies coming to the U.S. market and U.S. companies expanding to Europe. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the firm also has a presence in London and staff that speaks seven European languages. Contact TradeUp if you are looking to cross the Atlantic and need capital and counsel alike.

Kati Suominen is a visiting assistant adjunct professor at UCLA Anderson and founder and CEO of TradeUp. Her post originally appeared on the TradeUp blog. Suominen will travel to Davos, Switzerland, this month to participate in the Economist’s keynote discussion on digital ecosystems, coinciding with the 2016 World Economic Forum.

12/09/2015

A childhood bout of summer boredom might just have been the formative experience of Sandy Tesch Wilkins’ (’15) life. “I decided to do volunteer work, and started out as a clerical volunteer, answering phones and filing at the American Red Cross office in Concord, California.” It wasn’t long before she was attending the American Red Cross Leadership Development Center and learning skills such as project planning and public speaking — an important one for a shy 14-year-old. Since then, the Red Cross has led her to 12 countries — and to UCLA Anderson.

Wilkins noticed that many of the senior Red Cross leaders had MBAs, which, they said, helped them think across sectors. “The lines between nonprofits, government and business are increasingly blurred, so I knew the MBA would be the most flexible, relevant degree for me,” she says. “I also wanted the quantitative rigor of a business program since budgeting and finance skills are important in every context.” The smart yet still down-to-earth students, faculty and staff she met throughout the application process sealed the deal for UCLA Anderson.

WIlkins found her perfect fit in the Anderson chapter of Net Impact, a student group investigating the intersection of business and social innovation — from education to environmental sustainability to impact investing and more. Serving as the group’s president in her second year, Wilkins helped shepherd expansion of the Net Impact Consulting Challenge, a case competition focused on helping L.A.-area nonprofits, and the launch of the first-ever Social Innovation Week, exposing the broader Anderson community to the many intersections of business and social impact, from technology to corporate responsibility to media and entertainment through panel discussions, keynotes and a social impact marketplace.

11/27/2015

Brian Wasige (’17) arrived at UCLA Anderson from the UK offices of PwC with a keen interest in impact investing. Almost immediately after getting to campus, he established Impact Investing @ Anderson (II@A), recruiting a team that includes students, an alumnus, Anderson staff and faculty advisor Professor Bhagwan Chowdry — whose credibility Wasige won in part because he also convinced the Price Center of the group’s momentum and garnered his team some funding.

“I’m drawn to impact investing in the area of sustainability and agriculture technology because of the challenges that I have seen small-holder farmers — like my uncle in Kenya — face in developing countries,” says Wasige, who graduated from the University of Glasgow with an engineering degree, receiving first class honors.

Among II@A’s activities is the MIINT (MBA Impact Investing Network & Training) case competition. MIINT is an experiential venture lab designed to give students the experience of being an early-stage impact investor. The program provides learning modules to guide students through the investment process and culminates in a global case competition. Winners of the competition could secure as much as $50,000 in angel investment in their selected company.

11/18/2015

UCLA Anderson’s Center for Global Management hosted George R. Roberts, co-chairman and co-CEO of KKR, as part of CGM’s Robertson Lecture Series on Global Business Leadership. Roberts joined Dean Judy Olian for a conversation in which he reflected on his four decades of experience in financing, analyzing and investing in public and private companies, and how lessons from private equity translate to social enterprise.

KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. LP) is a global investment firm that manages investments across multiple asset classes, including private equity, energy, infrastructure, real estate, capital markets, credit strategies and hedge funds. KKR pioneered the strategy originally known as the leveraged buyout, but now commonly called private equity, the practice of buying undervalued companies, improving and reselling them, usually at a profit.

Roberts, who co-founded KKR with his cousin Henry Kravis, stressed the importance of fostering relationships when forming partnerships. “The essence of life is having personal relationships. They have to be built on total respect and total trust. The relationship you have with someone is far more important; all that other stuff doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t mean you can’t disagree,” he shared.

10/21/2015

You’ve heard of high tea. Here at Anderson, we observe High-Impact Tea — a monthly social and educational event open to faculty, students and staff across UCLA. It’s designed to provide a forum for conversation and exchange of ideas among people committed to innovation in business and other fields.

The inaugural installment drew a crowd that included Anderson alumni and administrative staff eager to catch up and make new acquaintances. Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry, who organizes the series with help from students, said, “High-Impact Tea gives us an opportunity to come together as a community. Meeting others from across the UCLA campus who have experiences and training different from our own will enrich our outlook and help us push boundaries. Many great ideas begin informally in social settings — with good food,” he added.

08/14/2015

When Brian Thomas (FEMBA ’14) was still enrolled in business school at UCLA Anderson, an angel investor handed him a $75,000 check to back his idea for an enterprise whose premise was “self-storage simplified.” In short order, Thomas secured additional angel funding before his degree was even conferred. Next, he found himself holding $2 million from a series seed round led in May by Resolute Ventures, with Amplify, Joanne Wilson, David Sacks, Matt Coffin, Wonder Ventures, Kombo Ventures and others participating. And, most recently, at the beginning of August, Thomas garnered his company another $1.3 million from the same groups of investors.

If Thomas made it seem easy, it’s because he’s in the business of simplifying people’s lives. Clutter, the full-service self-storage company Thomas co-founded with Tony Sziklai, manages the pick-up, documentation, storage and retrieval of clients’ extra belongings through a process “as convenient as pizza delivery.” But behind the scenes, Thomas worked hard to secure the funding, joining the startup accelerator Amplify and proving, by making the first year’s worth of Clutter pick-ups himself, that there was a market for this enterprise.

“I was always the kid with the lemonade stand,” says former U.S. Marine Platoon Sergeant Brian Bishop. At age 12 he wrote to Subway HQ asking for information about buying a franchise and urged his parents to open the first Subway restaurant in their Wyoming town, but they balked at the cost of the investment. Two years later, Bishop analyzed the nascent snowboarding market and determined that with a $6,000 loan he could launch a successful enterprise with 20 boards in a mobile shed — but none of the relatives, friends or passersby he avidly approached wanted to front a 14-year-old any money.

“My business plan is inside my head,” Bishop says. “It comes from knowledge of my industry and a decade as a design consultant. But I felt like my business acumen was getting stretched. I knew that if we’re going to stay competitive in the marketplace, we’re going to have to source capital.”

The guests were Leila Afas, director of export promotion for the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), and Pule Taukobong, founder and chairman of Africa Angels Network (AAN), a holding company that invests in Africa-focused startups. Although the event title was phrased as a question, it’s more of a declarative statement: Africa, by all accounts, is indeed the “next” investment frontier — evidently for large and small investors alike, foreign and domestic.

Ramine Cromartie (’15) introduced the panel, which was moderated by Assistant Professor Hannah Appel of UCLA’s anthropology department. Cromartie said this event aimed to “encourage collaboration among the clusters of intellectual capital that exists across the UCLA campus.”

04/09/2015

UCLA Anderson School of Management will host its ninth annual Wilbur K. Woo Greater China Business Conference, titled "U.S.-China: Economic Ties, Growth Strategies and Investment Opportunities," on Friday, April 10, 2015. Successful U.S. and Chinese business leaders, cross-border investors and academics will examine and debate the trends, strategies and opportunities as well as the challenges, issues and dynamics presented by transforming cross-border business and investment between the world’s two superpowers.

UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian and Michael Woo, Los Angeles' first Chinese-American city councilman and son of conference founder Wilbur K. Woo, will deliver opening remarks. They will be joined by Dunson K. Cheng, chairman, president and CEO of Cathay General Bancorp and chairman and CEO of Cathay Bank. This will be followed by a macro overview of China by William Yu, economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast, and a business perspective provided by Alan Chu, Partner and China Business Network Leader for PwC.

“We recognize that cross-border activity is at record high levels across all segments — public, private and individual,” says Woo. “In the city where East meets West, today’s leading thinkers and influential business minds are gathering to provide a platform for intellectual exchange, idea generation and networking.”

03/14/2015

On March 10, 2015, the Fink Center at UCLA Anderson held its 5th annual Private Equity Roundtable in the Executive Dining Room in Gold Hall. More than 100 individuals gathered to discuss the state of private equity today.

The event began with a cocktail reception, where students mingled with 40-50 industry professionals from the top private equity shops in Southern California. This reception was followed by a keynote discussion with David Kaplan, co-founder of Ares Management and Senior Partner of Ares Private Equity, moderated by Professor Bill Cockrum of UCLA Anderson. The evening concluded with three roundtable sessions between students and industry professionals.